Trend price : 200€
Rackmount Midi digital Vocoder with DJ live features released at the end of the nineties with other effects like Filter Factory - The warp is a pretty simple vocoder with many real-time controls that be used with either internal carrier (oscillator) or external one.
Overview
EFFECT RACKMOUNT MODULE Main panel is pretty simple: no display, 5 buttons and 7 knobs.
Rear panel terminal connectors:
- Midi interface
- Midi channel selector
- RCA stereo main out
- Jack stereo main out
- RCA stereo signal input
- Jack stereo signal input
- switch for input between phono and line impedance / RIAA
- formant input with 10 /+4 gain switch.
- pedalswitch input for bypass.
Voice
hardware machine based on physical modelling algorithm instead of traditional multiband analog filtering. The vocoder principle is based on two main elements:
- Source is the sound to be shaped
- Formant is the signal to shape the source.
STRUCTURE: the warp is basically split into 3 macro sections:
1- Formant input
2- Formant Warp
3- Mixing section.
1- Formant input
first section allows to choose the FORMANT sources and the relative gain optimization, according to 3 LED-meters: green and orange indicate optimum source levels, red means that the input is overloaded. Special "LINE ESS" source mode simulates the letter sibilant (like "S") with a gated white noise aimed to preserve speech intelligibility.
2- Formant warp this section models the signal with various functions:
- BAND optimizes the process for either high or low frequencies - e.g.: drum loops
- GENDER changes harmonic content of the formant without chancing the fundamental pitch of the musical source
- Q is the amount of filter resonance
- ORDER sets the filter algorithm 's resolution and precision
- ROBOT PITCH is an internal oscillator with variable frequency
- NOISE amount of white noise for sibilance control
- FREEZE BUTTON temporally freezes the formant shape until it is released.
3- Mixing this section allows final signal settings:
- SOURCE KILL auto-gates the signal if no incoming formant are detected
- EFFECT MIX balances between dry and wet
- BYPASS the function speaks for it self (can be assigned to external switchpedal).
MIDI & MEMORY all functions are mapped to Control Change #.
It is possible to save a sound configuration using Midi sysex dump since there is no memory for storage.
Audio demo:
Video Clip:
Review
OK: -a lot of tweaks- freeze -price
NOT : boring
"Oh the Warp factory was nice for sure at the time, but there are now a lot of synth with internal digital vocoder or plugins.However if you spend some time it can be a precious source of french touch grooves or weird alien sounds. "
Text , review, special demos copyright polynominal.com / Eric Pochesci